“Your talent’s so great that it’s in everything you do, in what’s less good as well as in what’s best. You’ve some forty volumes to show for it—forty volumes of wonderful life, of rare observation, of magnificent ability.”
“I’m very clever, of course I know that”—but it was a thing, in fine, this author made nothing of. “Lord, what rot they’d all be if I hadn’t been I’m a successful charlatan,” he went on—“I’ve been able to pass off my system. But do you know what it is? It’s cartonpierre.”
“Carton-pierre?” Paul was struck, and gaped.
“Lincrusta-Walton!”
“Ah don’t say such things—you make me bleed!” the younger man protested. “I see you in a beautiful fortunate home, living in comfort and honour.”
“Do you call it honour?”—his host took him up with an intonation that often comes back to him. “That’s what I want you to go in for. I mean the real thing. This is brummagem.”
“Brummagem?” Paul ejaculated while his eyes wandered, by a movement natural at the moment, over the luxurious room.
“Ah they make it so well to-day—it’s wonderfully deceptive!”
Our friend thrilled with the interest and perhaps even more with the pity of it. Yet he wasn’t afraid to seem to patronise when he could still so far envy. “Is it deceptive that I find you living with every appearance of domestic felicity—blest with a devoted, accomplished wife, with children whose acquaintance I haven’t yet had the pleasure of making, but who must be delightful young people, from what I know of their parents?”
St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. “It’s all excellent, my dear fellow—heaven forbid I should deny it. I’ve made a great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify. I’ve got a loaf on the shelf; I’ve got everything in fact but the great thing.”